AI Execution Plan
Where does AI actually pay off for your team?
The answer is measurable. Your AI Execution Plan is built from three readings of your actual team: how your people execute, how your systems hold, and where the week really goes. You leave with one first move, the evidence behind it, and thirty days to prove it.
Get my execution profileFree. 25 questions. Reading 01 of your AI Execution Plan.
70%
of the challenge in getting value from AI is people and process. Twenty percent is technology. Ten percent is the algorithms themselves.
Source: Boston Consulting Group, October 2024
Where teams get stuck
Almost nobody starts by asking about readiness
They start in one of these three places.
The pilot worked. The rollout didn't.
An impressive demo, then no measurable change in the numbers. It is common: 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17% the year before.
Source: S&P Global, 2025 survey
The licenses are bought. Nobody uses them.
The tools were fine. The training happened. And the way your team actually works never changed, so the seats sit idle. This is the moment it stops being a technology problem.
Too many tools. No place to start.
Every vendor says start now. None of them can say where, because none of them has looked at where your team's week actually goes. Teams in this spot are stuck rather than skeptical.
Three stories, one root: an AI rollout runs on how your team already executes. Most readiness assessments scan your stack or inventory skills. How the actual team executes goes unmeasured.
The usual readiness assessment hands you a maturity score across five or six dimensions and a gap list. Leaders read it once and file it. XI returns one first action per person and per team, drawn from their own logged week, with the first move written in plain words.
The part everyone skips
AI does not fix the way your team executes. It inherits it.
It amplifies the phases each person is strong in and neglects the ones they skip. Someone strong on Vision will use AI to ideate, and it will happily keep ideating without ever asking who builds the thing.
Whatever your team's execution shape is today, AI is about to make it more so. So measure the shape first. Three readings of the same team.
01 · Your people
It starts with your people
Every initiative your team has ever run moved through the same six phases: Vision, Architecture, Alignment, Momentum, Reflection, Integration. An AI rollout will run through them too.
So that is where the measurement starts. Each person takes the Execution Index: 25 questions, a profile of how they actually execute. Put the profiles together and your team has a shape: where it is strong, where it stalls, and which capability nobody covers.
This first reading is free and open to your whole team today. Each person finishes in about ten minutes and keeps a profile that stands on its own, with or without the rest of the plan. Readings 02 and 03, the systems reading and the workflow inventory, complete the full AI Execution Plan for your team and for every person on it.
Take the Execution Index free
The bold line is the team. The thin lines are the people.
Six layers, rated by the people who use them.
02 · Your systems
How your systems hold up
Your team rates the organization across six layers: Leadership, Governance, Workforce, Data, Technology, and ROI. The rating comes from the people who live in those systems while doing real work, and that honesty is the point.
An AI rollout leans on exactly these layers. This reading shows which ones hold and which ones your team already works around.
03 · The work
Where the hours go
Each person logs their actual week in three to four minutes: pick your role, check the tasks that fill your week, add the hours and the pain for each.
No interviews, no meetings. The inventory is your team's real week, entered by the people who live it.
Check your tasks, set hours and pain. Three to four minutes.
Every workflow your team logged, ranked. Every input visible.
04 · The evidence
An answer you can defend
Then every workflow gets ranked by hours, pain, and how much of that work AI already does well today, from published research on real tasks. Same inputs, same ranking, every line traceable to what your team reported. No guesses about "AI potential."
The judgment stays yours. Now it has a measurement under it.
What you receive
Two reports for the team. Two for every person.
Every page builds from what your team reported. Nothing is invented.
The team's AI Execution Plan
Six pages that put the three readings side by side: your people, your systems, your work, and where to start. A second team document, the team XI report, carries the full execution profile behind it (the radar you saw above, phase by phase).
1 · Cover
Prepared for your team, dated, the data behind it disclosed up front.
2 · The Picture
Three dimensions of the same team, in one view.
3 · Your People
The measured shape of your team's six phases and what stands out.
4 · Your Systems
The six layers as your team rated them, load-bearing ones called out.
5 · The Work
Your logged week, ranked, with the strongest candidates named.
6 · How to Use This Picture
What to do with the reading, plus how every score was formed.
Every person gets two readings of their own
One is their Execution Index profile, the full diagnostic report from the free assessment. The other is their personal AI Execution Plan: eight pages built from their own execution profile, their own rating of the systems around them, and the actual work they logged. It opens with one first action, drawn from their own week and narrated through the six execution phases on their profile, then names the two or three places where AI can help them first.
That precision matters. In a Harvard and BCG field experiment with 758 consultants, AI raised quality by up to 40 percent on tasks it suited. On a task just outside that line, consultants using AI were 19 points more likely to get it wrong. Knowing which of your tasks fall on which side is the whole game.
Source: Dell'Acqua et al., Harvard Business School, 2023
AI use at work nearly doubled in two years, yet only 22 percent of employees say their organization has shared a clear plan for it. The personal AI Execution Plan is that plan, one person at a time.
Source: Gallup, 2025
1 · Cover
Prepared for one person, from their own three readings.
2 · Your First Action
The one move to start, narrated through the six execution phases on your own profile.
6 · Where to Try AI First
The two or three places in your own work where AI can help you first.
Free. 25 questions. Reading 01 of your AI Execution Plan.
The honest part
This report will never call you AI ready
No single score can, and this one will not pretend otherwise. It gives you three measured readings, how each was formed, the number of people each rests on, and the questions the data cannot answer alone. The call stays yours. A tool that hands out verdicts replaces your judgment. A tool that hands you evidence backs it.
How it runs
What your team actually does
Three short assessments, on their own time. Each person gets one email with only the links they still need. Nobody sits in a meeting to produce data.
Reading 01 · People
The Execution Index: 25 questions, about ten minutes. Free, starts today.
Reading 02 · Systems
The systems survey: 25 questions, about ten minutes.
Reading 03 · Work
The week log: pick your role, check your tasks, add hours and pain. Three to four minutes.
Under 25 minutes per person. The reading builds itself from what they report.
Reading 01 is free and open to your team today. Readings 02 and 03 complete your full AI Execution Plan inside an engagement.
What next
From reading to first proof
The reading hands you a decision, and the decision is yours: fix what it uncovered, or run your first AI project with evidence behind the pick. Either way, you and your consultant choose one move and give it thirty days to prove itself.
The readings come with people who walk you through them. A team debrief covers the team reports. Every person can book an individual debrief of their own.
Get my execution profileFree. 25 questions. Reading 01 of your AI Execution Plan.
What leaders find
A personal read that gets sharper the moment the team takes it
The same assessment that shows you where your own work slows down shows a team where it shares strengths, and where the blind spots are.
“It showed me exactly where I needed to focus. In a word: winner.”
Head of Product
Funded AI startup
“It helped my team see where we shared strengths, and surfaced blind spots we had been missing.”
P&L owner
Fortune 500
“Surprisingly simple to take, and genuinely useful for individuals and teams alike.”
Head of Training and Development
$3B consumer goods company
Who built this
He's run the operations you're running
John Vyhlidal has run the operations you're running. Military officer, Big 4 consultant, Fortune 500 executive, business owner. Twenty years building the systems that turn strategy into results while everyone else was still arguing about the plan.
He was the person they called when a transformation was stuck. He inherited teams that were underwater and delivered what he said he would deliver.
The Execution Index is that experience turned into a diagnostic. It looks for what he looks for: where the work is about to slow down, and what to do about it first. Built over 25 years of leading transformations, grounded in the science of how people are wired, and checked against decades of documented cases of where change succeeds and where it fails.
Take it yourself first. See where your own next initiative is most likely to slow down.
Questions
What exactly is the AI Execution Plan?
Three measured readings of your team (your people, your systems, and the week they actually work) fused into one recommendation: where AI pays off first, whether the rollout will hold, and what evidence at day thirty counts as proof. Every number traces back to what your team reported. It starts with reading 01, the free Execution Index.
Do we need to pick an AI vendor first?
No. The plan works the same whatever you run today or choose later.
We already did personality assessments. Is this another one?
No. Personality tools describe who people are; this measures how your team executes, then adds your systems and your actual week on top.
What does my team actually have to do?
Three short assessments from an emailed link, under 25 minutes total per person. No meetings.
What if only part of the team completes it?
The plan still builds, and it shows exactly how many people each reading rests on. It never fills a gap with a guess.
Will this tell us if we are AI ready?
It gives you three measured readings and the evidence behind each one. The call stays yours, and you make it holding a measurement instead of a hunch.
What does the whole thing cost?
Starting costs nothing. Reading 01, the Execution Index, is free for you and your whole team, and every person keeps their profile. The full plan (readings 02 and 03, the reports, the workshop, the debriefs) is scoped with your consultant. The fee depends on the size of your team and the scope you choose.
Start with the measurement
The question is coming to your desk either way. Answer it with a reading of your actual team.
Get my execution profileFree. 25 questions. Reading 01 of your AI Execution Plan.